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Sometimes low tech is tech enough

To salvage existing equipment, winery finds unique solution to capsule wrinkles—by turning a conveyor on end.

As wine bottles emerge from the heat tunnel that shrinks the capsule around the bottle neck, a vertical conveyor belt rotates th
As wine bottles emerge from the heat tunnel that shrinks the capsule around the bottle neck, a vertical conveyor belt rotates th

Delicato Family Vineyards, Napa, CA, has worked for 75 years to gain the recognition of producing world-class wines. However, its bottling operation wasn’t up to the task of putting the fine wines in a world-class package, one that the owners could be proud to show.

That’s because the sole packaging line at the winery had difficulty bottling the wines without creating wrinkles in the bottles’ capsules. According to Rick Enos, project engineer at Delicato, as many as one in five bottles displayed unacceptable wrinkles.

“The marketing people select the capsule designs solely for their appearance, not for how they perform on the packaging line,” he says. The company typically uses stock capsules, often with different colors. As Enos has discovered, a simple heat tunnel for shrinking the capsules around the bottles’ necks can itself create a bottleneck when the capsules combine colors that are both heat reflective and heat absorbing.

“Many of our capsules have a couple of gold bands near the bottom,” he says. “The gold color reflects the heat of the heat tunnel, while the dark color of the rest of the capsule is absorbing the heat. This can cause wrinkling because you have the difference in heat-absorption and -reflectance.”

The key, says Enos, is rotating the bottles sufficiently as they are conveyed through the heat tunnel. “When you have the combination of reflectance and absorption, you end up with different shrinkage rates within the same capsule. But if your line can rotate the bottle a few times, you can even it out.”

All capsules used by Delicato are made of polyvinyl chloride, but the metallic color bands that make the capsules more attractive weren’t making the heat-shrunk capsules as attractive as they should have been.

Chance call spells success

As so often happens in problem solving these days, the solution to the Delicato problem came as the result of a sales cold call. Enos relates, “You’ve got to remember that most of the bottles with wrinkled capsules were never even noticed by the consumer, so we didn’t really have a policy about repackaging them.”

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